Module to implement playlist features and metadata generation

 
Module to implement playlist features and metadata generation

Stockmusic.net is one of the largest providers of royalty-free music in the United States. Their clientele includes Fox, Time Warner, HBO and other firms in television, film, advertising, and apps.

StockMusic.net hosts an extensive database of music from great composers worldwide as well as a multitude of genres.

Buying royalty-free music from stockmusic.net is the easiest way to add background audio to any media application. Every track is legal and affordable. Customers don’t have to worry about copyrights, legal issues or price.

LiteBreeze has been working with StockMusic team to implement new features and improve the user experience. Recently, LiteBreeze helped implement enhanced playlist features, promotional offers and automated metadata generation for the tracks.

The new playlist management lets users maintain multiple playlists and the final playlists can be shared publicly. It is also possible to purchase the whole playlists in a single order.

In the past, the system did not allow more than one playlist per user; This made it difficult for users to organize music based on their needs.

Promotional offers feature enables the marketing team to create coupon codes easily. Users can apply these promotional codes during checkout to avail discounts.

Newly added tracks are analyzed using various audio analysis tools for mood detection, key detection, meta information and audio fingerprinting.

Key functionalities

StockMusic.net has a massive collection of audio files stored in cloud storage. Searching through this vast collection is not a trivial feat.

However, stockmusic.net hosts an intelligent search engine backed by AWS CloudSearch.

This allows for an intuitive search experience enabling users to search using genres, moods, instruments, keywords, vocals, and collections.

Users can then easily listen to music matching their search and purchase royalty-free licenses. The high-quality versions of music are immediately available after purchase.

Custom music composition

The users can create music compositions with the help from the talented musicians at Stockmusic. Compositions can be created to suit their custom requirements.

Should a user choose to create their own composition, the website will provide an instant quote based on requirement details.

Technical information

The website is developed using LEMP stack (Linux, Nginx, MySQL and PHP). Backend services are built using Laravel and frontend uses Vue.js.

As avid proponents of TDD (test-driven development), StockMusic.net strive for maximum test coverage of its code. This resulted in PHP unit tests, followed by semaphore continuous integration tool vetting each GIT commit using an extensive set of automated tests.

Then a comprehensive set of browser automation tests using Laravel Dusk.

Global team

Our Indian web development team coordinates on a daily basis with the StockMusic team in the USA. We use Basecamp, slack, and webcam meetings for seamless communication and enhance service quality.

Next priorities

The APIs were initially built without the corresponding front-end so moving forward we will work on the integration of a suitable UI/UX.

The upcoming modules will include:

  • Subscription plans with various options
  • Efficient analytics and overlay graphs
  • Option to search and find music using parameters such as length and tempo
Module to implement playlist features and metadata generation
When we started our contract, I had concerns about hiring an international, remote team. I feared we would have issues communicating, lots of difficult training and poor code quality. None of these fears came true! The communication is wonderful and exceeded my expectations. The expertise from our developers shows in their quality and how quickly they learned our existing systems and code base. Every week, someone from a different team reads all the new code and offers QA suggestions to help with security, performance, and maintainability. I don't get this level of quality from my local software team. They clearly have a culture of excellence, not commonly found in international software contracting firms. Thanks, LiteBreeze! I can relax knowing you are handling the job well, and with the care it requires. - Ryan Allen
Team of developers who worked on this project: Vijay, Musafar, Aswathy V, Nikhil, Praveesh